Emulation systems typically use a computer, or other digital system, to simulate, or "emulate", a digital circuit being designed or developed. The emulation system is designed to mimic the logical operation of the digital circuit. This means that the signal inputs given to the emulator will result in the emulator outputing signals identical to that which would be output when the emulated circuit is given the same input signals.
During emulation, a trace buffer is used as an aid in analyzing and debugging the circuit under development. The trace buffer stores a record of changing states of signal inputs, signal outputs and internal signals of the circuit being emulated. In a digital synchronous system the states are stored once per clock cycle. The use of a trace buffer allows the circuit designer to emulate the circuit under development and operate the circuit up to a point where an error condition occurs. The trace buffer may continue to collect signal states but at some point tracing is stopped to allow the human designer to examine the record of signal states to determine what events caused the error. Alternatively, the operation of the circuit may be permitted to continue past the error condition so that the designer has a record of events that occur after the error condition. In this way, the record of signal states provided by the trace buffer aids the designer in developing a digital circuit. Emulation methods in use today provide other analytical tools to aid the designer in debugging the circuit.
A problem arises in traditional emulation methods where the size and speed of the digital circuit being designed introduces problems of efficiency and accuracy in emulating the circuit.
In order for a circuit under design to be accurately emulated the emulation of the circuit must run at, or close to, the circuit's target operating speed. This is because the circuit being emulated must often interface with external circuitry operating at real time speeds. Also, certain problems in the design of the circuit may only be apparent when the emulation is run at target operating speeds.
An emulation method in use today uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to emulate a circuit. With this method, a logic description of the circuit is prepared by the designer. The logic description is input to a compiler that determines how to implement the logic description in the FPGAs. Assuming two or more FPGAs are used the design is broken down into subsystems where each subsystem can be implemented on one of the FPGAs. This step is critical since the number of pins on an FPGA package often restricts the types of signals that can later be traced. For example, typical numbers of input/output (I/O) pins available on an FPGA package range from 64 to 144. Invariably these pins are in short supply because of interfacing requirements for the FPGA. This causes problems when the designer must decide which signals internal to the FPGA to make available on I/O pins so that the signals can be traced during emulation.
Once a trace has been performed, the signals in the trace buffer, corresponding to signals in the compiled FPGA circuits, are correlated to signals in the original circuit under development.
A circuit may also be emulated in a computer system. The computer system may be a general purpose computer or a dedicated computer system whose architecture is designed especially for emulating complex digital circuits. In general, for a general purpose computer, the circuit emulation is carried out mostly by software. For a dedicated computer system, the more specialized the architecture, the more the circuit design is emulated by the hardware rather than software. In either computer emulation system, the problems of specifying which signals to trace and correlating the traced signals to signals in the original design still exist.
An additional problem where substantial portions of the emulation are accomplished via software is that the emulation is very slow compared to the target operating speed of the circuit. Tracing, or capturing signal states, will often be performed by software. However, this has the drawback that the emulation is slowed down even more. Where tracing is done substantially by hardware the size of the trace buffer limits the number of signals that may be traced and the number of clock cycles during which a signal may be traced in any given emulation run.
The emulation, tracing and correlation steps may be repeated many times while the designer attempts to isolate and solve a problem with the circuit design. Often, the designer must make a choice as to which signals to trace at any given emulation run. If it turns out that not all of the necessary signals have been traced the designer must go back and perform another trace that may involve manually connecting and disconnecting signal paths to, e.g., an external logic analyzer, in order to capture the missing signal. Even more burdensome where FPGAs are used, a signal that the designer is interested in may not be provided on an FPGA pin. In this case, the designer must go back to the compile step in order to specify that the desired signal must be connected to an FPGA pin. Each repetition of the compiling, emulating, tracing and correlating steps adds to the development time of the circuit and increases the cost. Therefore, a system is needed which eliminates the problems of the emulation systems described above.